Only when the freewheeling has finished should you start to analyze the ideas and select priorities for further investigation or even further brainstorming. Keep the analysis stage in small groups for as long as possible, and limit the assessment of one person - e.g. yourself - to the very last stage if a final decision has to be made by one person.
You don't have to wait until you have a problem to brainstorm. You can use the 'what if' questing to practice creative thinking regularly, or just to 'see' what you are doing, were you are going and what might be two steps ahead. What if the market for our rising star plummeted next week? What if we were bought out next month? What if I wasn't around for the next 6 weeks?
Brainstorming is not just a gimmick. The combination of lifting routine rigidities and group activity produces results. Continuing as far as possible in groups during subsequent phases is important too. The initial idea may not be what is useful at the end of the day. But it may spark off the creativity of another member of the group, not to refine the original idea but to come up with something totally different. You also need a mix of creative and innovatory talents working together so that good ideas can be followed thorough by champions who are prepared to be unpopular and bend the rules in pursuing their commitment.
A simple exercise which demonstrates to management students the value of group participation in creativity is to put a plastic cup on the table and ask the group to work entirely on their own in jotting down as many different uses for it as they can think of in 1 minute. Then go round the group listing them all, ignoring duplications. In any group of, say, eight, if you ask each individual how many different ideas they come up with, the average is around nine, but the combined list for the whole group is always around 45. You can use this kind of exercise as a warm up session to get ideas flowing before your main brainstorming.
You never know where an idea will come from. Art Fry, the man who brought those little self-adhesive and revocable notes - Post Its - to every discerning manager's desk, said of those who both invent and innovate like himself: We are trying to do things that are different and trying to do things that people don't really understand yet and you're not sure you understand them yourself. Fry's success depended heavily not only on the loyalty and support of his boss but on access to corporate funds, technology, manufacturing facilities and marketing channels. The original idea came from his desire to mark up page numbers securely in his hymnal during choral practice, without damaging the pages. But in getting the early development to fruition, he took advantage of corporate policy that gave all technical personnel 15 per cent of their time to work quietly on ideas of their own. Art Fry's drive and entrepreneurship can hardly be described as working quietly, but no one is complaining, least of all his boss.
You don't have to wait until you have a problem to brainstorm. You can use the 'what if' questing to practice creative thinking regularly, or just to 'see' what you are doing, were you are going and what might be two steps ahead. What if the market for our rising star plummeted next week? What if we were bought out next month? What if I wasn't around for the next 6 weeks?
Brainstorming is not just a gimmick. The combination of lifting routine rigidities and group activity produces results. Continuing as far as possible in groups during subsequent phases is important too. The initial idea may not be what is useful at the end of the day. But it may spark off the creativity of another member of the group, not to refine the original idea but to come up with something totally different. You also need a mix of creative and innovatory talents working together so that good ideas can be followed thorough by champions who are prepared to be unpopular and bend the rules in pursuing their commitment.
A simple exercise which demonstrates to management students the value of group participation in creativity is to put a plastic cup on the table and ask the group to work entirely on their own in jotting down as many different uses for it as they can think of in 1 minute. Then go round the group listing them all, ignoring duplications. In any group of, say, eight, if you ask each individual how many different ideas they come up with, the average is around nine, but the combined list for the whole group is always around 45. You can use this kind of exercise as a warm up session to get ideas flowing before your main brainstorming.
You never know where an idea will come from. Art Fry, the man who brought those little self-adhesive and revocable notes - Post Its - to every discerning manager's desk, said of those who both invent and innovate like himself: We are trying to do things that are different and trying to do things that people don't really understand yet and you're not sure you understand them yourself. Fry's success depended heavily not only on the loyalty and support of his boss but on access to corporate funds, technology, manufacturing facilities and marketing channels. The original idea came from his desire to mark up page numbers securely in his hymnal during choral practice, without damaging the pages. But in getting the early development to fruition, he took advantage of corporate policy that gave all technical personnel 15 per cent of their time to work quietly on ideas of their own. Art Fry's drive and entrepreneurship can hardly be described as working quietly, but no one is complaining, least of all his boss.
